A man mistook a meteorite found in Australia for a gold nugget

Australian David Hole kept the stone and believed he had found gold. But after many attempts to “open” the block with a pick, the man went to the museum and gave them the find. Experts conducted research and learned that it turned out to be a rare meteorite 4.6 billion years old.

Australian David Hole discovered something unusual using a metal detector – a very heavy reddish stone lying in some kind of yellow clay. He took it home and tried every way to open it. The man was sure that there was a gold nugget inside the stone. This conclusion was reached because the town where the stone was found, Maryborough, is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush reached its peak in the 19th century. David Hole has tried everything from a stone saw to dipping an object in acid. However, nothing could break through the crack.

After futile attempts to extract gold from the stone, the Australian took the nugget to the museum for identification. As Hole learned years later, he had found a rare meteorite.

“He had this sculpted look with dimples. This is formed when meteorites pass through the atmosphere, they melt on the outside,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told the Sydney Morning Herald.

The geologist was skeptical about Hole’s find because “he had seen a lot of rocks that people consider meteorites. But the discovery of a real meteorite, and such a rare one, shocked the scientist. After 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of stones, Henry admitted that only two of the exhibits on display turned out to be real.

“If you saw a rock like this on the ground and picked it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch explained to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The researchers published a scientific paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria describing the 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough after the town near where it was found.

He weighs a whopping 17 kilograms. In a small piece cut with a diamond saw, the researchers found a high percentage of iron in its composition.

Once opened, you may also see tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals called chondrules.

“Meteorites provide the cheapest way to explore space. “They take us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation and chemical composition of our solar system, including Earth,” says geologist Henry. He adds that some meteorites contain “stardust” that is even older than our solar system, showing how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table. Other rare meteorites may contain organic molecules.

Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from or how long it might have been on Earth, they have some guesses.

“This particular meteorite most likely came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and was pushed out by several asteroids colliding with each other, and then one day it crashes into Earth,” Dermot Henry said in an interview.

Radiocarbon dating indicated that the meteorite had been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and between 1889 and 1951 there were several sightings of the meteorite that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.

Researchers say the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it much more valuable to science. It is one of just 17 meteorites ever recorded from the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest iron-bearing mass after a huge 55kg sample discovered in 2003.

This is not the first meteorite that took several years to get to the museum. According to ScienceAlert in 2018, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a job as a doorpost before it was finally revealed what it really was.